30 October 2008It feels like the real accelerator tunnel, but it’s only building 71 at DESY in Hamburg. It’s basically a tube made of concrete, 51 metres long and 5.20 metres in diameter. One accelerator module hangs from the top of the tube, water pipes, cable trays and ventilation ducts are installed and other accelerator parts stand around on the tunnel floor. All these are dummies, some even made of wood, but they are life-size dummies in building 71: the European XFEL mock-up tunnel.
Category: Feature | Tagged: DESY, tunnel, XFEL
23 October 2008With the activation of the LHC, or Large Hadron Collider, some particle physicists are now looking forward to the next big machine. For many, that's the International Linear Collider. The ILC aims to break new ground in particle physics by slamming a beam of electrons into a beam of the electron's alter ego: the positron.
Category: Feature | Tagged: cathode electrode, electron source, JLab
Rika Takahashi | 23 October 2008From 29 to 30 September, the second Asia ILC R&D Seminar was held at Kyungpook National University (KNU) in Korea with help from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Core University Program and the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation. This workshop aimed to review the progress of R&D for the ILC accelerator in Asia region, and to promote regional and inter-regional collaborations on the accelerator and active participations from individual countries to ILC, focusing on the installation schedule and preparation for commissioning.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Asia, ATF2, Korea
9 October 2008Much of the history of particle physics has been devoted almost exclusively to finding out what our bodies are made of. We first learned about protons and electrons and neutrons because they constitute the matter that makes up our bodies, and we learned of photons (light) because it interacts with our bodies when we see. Up and down quarks are the constituents of protons and neutrons, and they are held together by gluons, carriers of the strong force. Neutrons turn into protons through the weak force. Thus, everything we study has a close connection to our physical bodies. Even exotic particles, such as charm quarks or tau leptons are merely nearly exact copies of particles that make up our bodies: only their masses are different.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Higgs, ILC physics
Rika Takahashi | 2 October 2008The International Linear Collider requires a detector with excellent performance to fully exploit its physics potential. In order to meet this challenge, significant improvements in the calorimetric performance are needed compared to previous generations of detectors, and new technologies and techniques are being developed. To test those technologies and techniques with particle beams, scientists are travelling around the world, to where beamlines with particle beams for tests are available.
Category: Feature | Tagged: ECal, Fermilab, Japan, Korea
Rika Takahashi | 25 September 2008On Wednesday, 24 September, KEK held a symposium entitled “Starting up the world's most powerful accelerators: LHC and J-PARC” in Tokyo. This symposium was the second one in a series of symposiums aiming for gaining more understanding of accelerator science. The main audience of this symposium was the industry. “We would like to place an emphasis on the collaboration between industry, the universities and the laboratories which enable those big accelerator projects,” said Mitsuaki Nozaki, the chief organiser of the symposium. “I believe that efforts like these are essential to realise another big accelerator project in the future, such as the ILC,” he added.
Category: Feature | Tagged: J-PARC, KEK
Barbara Warmbein | 11 September 2008Wednesday must have been one of the biggest days in science history. It certainly was the biggest day in particle physics for a long time coming - the first full beam around the LHC. The first protons completed the full circle at 10:28 am (less than an hour after first injection), and scientists in CERN's control rooms cheered and clapped, ran to the screens, pointed at monitors and breathed a massive, communal sigh of relief. Amazingly, after a cryogenic glitch around lunchtime, another first beam made its first full lap in the opposite direction at 15:03. The media centre in CERN's Globe was abuzz, French media had gathered in a Paris bar to follow the events, German press was connected via a multi-way videoconference and at Fermilab scientists and press watched in dressing gown and pyjamas. It was a picture-book start-up.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, LHC
11 September 2008Geneva, 10 September 2008. The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN1 was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres of the world's most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 this morning. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, LHC
4 September 2008Faster, higher, farther! The motto of this year's Olympic Games is also valid for the development of research opportunities. But unlike the Olympic athletes who struggle to beat world records by fractions of hundredths, the development of accelerator experiments is progressing in such extreme steps that researchers have to clear completely new hurdles – their measuring instruments are too inaccurate.
Category: Feature | Tagged: DESY, IEEE
Barbara Warmbein | 28 August 2008The international time projection chamber (TPC) team that works on R&D for future ILC detectors used to have a bit of a running gag. Somebody would proclaim that “the field cage will arrive next week” and everybody else would chuckle because week after week it didn’t arrive. Chuckling days are over now: after several years of planning the cage for the large TPC prototype, ordering it from industry, checking the quality, rejecting parts of the product and reordering, the nearly one-metre-long barrel with an inner diameter of 72 centimetres has finally arrived at DESY in Hamburg. First tests indicate that it will finally meet the team's high requirements.
Category: Feature | Tagged: DESY, detector R&D, time projection chamber, TPC
